In today's fast-paced e-business world, there is less face-to-face communication than ever. Regardless of e-commerce, people still do business based on relationships. We develop those relationships with communication. Crews communicates with most of our customers by phone, so it is imperative that our skills and overall contact program are effective.

Crews went on a mission to evaluate its communication with customers and determine the most effective way to contact each one. Like other businesses, we have a variety of distributors — some that focus on selling our product line and others that sell our product line as a convenience to their customers, but not as their main focus. How do you make sure you are effectively servicing each account?

We started by installing a contact management system, ACT, to house all of our customer information. ACT has become the main portal to document conversations, capture relevant facts and store important contact information. Everyone in our organization can access ACT so we can be more knowledgeable when servicing our customers.

Once all of our information was in ACT, we needed to determine the most effective way to contact customers. After making calls, we began noting in the customer's record whether to call them monthly, quarterly, only when we have a new product, or every six weeks. This allows us to meet their needs without being overwhelming or bothersome. On each call we take a step further in developing the relationship by asking questions to help us understand more about their business.

Additionally, we started focusing on a company-wide, monthly objective as a team effort. This objective could be a new product, new options for existing products, new services or products to which we would like to call attention. Sales, marketing, and customer service all focus on this objective and each has a role in communicating it. We synchronize our on-hold message, as well as our individual voicemail messages, to include the monthly objective. We also design an e-mail and fax around the objective and send those to customers to reinforce the overall message. When appropriate, I initiate an incentive contest to coincide with the objective to help the efforts along.

These initiatives take care of the process and procedures, but what about improving employees' communication skills? We've done this by initiating a Toastmaster's Speaking Club. The Toastmaster structure allows members to practice their skills at conducting meetings, giving impromptu speeches, presenting prepared speeches and evaluating speeches made by fellow members.

We also have "lunch and learn" training sessions, which focus on competitive, industry and product information. We focus on other skills such as handling objections, asking for the order, and basics to improve relationships with our customers. In addition to standard training sessions, salespeople frequently practice their presentations so others can critique them.

The world of communication is changing. Each company is challenged to do business better and more effectively. Most people still want to be serviced by and communicate with a live person, not voicemail. We have streamlined communication to better suit our customers and have given our employees some tangible tools to improve their skills.